A blue and white ko-sometsuke 'fishermen' chrysanthemum-form tripod dish, Ming dynasty, Tianqi period

Japanese Private Collection.

Shogado & Co., Tokyo.

Ming Porcelain for the Japanese Market, ko-sometsuke and ko-akai, Marchant, London, 2008, pp. 88/9, cat. no. 46.

The clever composition is skillfully and confidently done. The water is rendered with a few deft linear strokes beneath each boat, while the seemingly spontaneous placement of the rockwork resolves into a composition of striking coherence. The drawing recalls that of the Wanli period, suggesting the hand of a highly accomplished artist working into the Tianqi reign.

Compare a dish of the same form and size painted with an identical landscape with the single peak mountain in the distance from a slightly different angle, gifted by Roy Leventritt to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, illustrated in Julia B. Curtis, Trade, Taste and Transformation, Jingdezhen Porcelain for Japan, 1620-1645, New York, 2006, p. 100, cat. no. 80, where the author mentions that the "dish represents a considerable investment of labour". A closely related dish, also with masks on the raised feet, is preserved in the Seikado Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo, and illustrated in Kosometsuke, Tokyo, 2017, pl. 64 and by Huang Qinghua in Colourful Japan – The Special Exhibition of the Ordered Porcelains at the End of the Ming Dynasty From Japan, Jingdezhen, 2021, pl. 16. A further dish of this form and measurement, painted with a large elephant was included by Marchant in their exhibition of Two Hundred Years of Chinese Porcelain, 1522-1722, London, 1998, cat. no. 35.